5 Social Media Predictions Marketers Got Wrong Last Year

The world around us is constantly changing — it only makes sense that the marketing world does too.

Every year, marketers pull out the crystal ball to predict trends and shifts in the coming year. Sometimes we're right on the tail — and other times the social media marketing landscape surprises us.

Here, we'll cover 5 social media predictions marketers got wrong in 2021 and strategies for making better predictions in the future.

5 Bad Social Media Predictions of 2021

1. The TikTok craze will reach its peak.

Despite threats of being banned in the U.S. — and actually being banned in India — TikTok continues to defy the odds and grow at a steady rate. In fact, the app hit a remarkable milestone at the end of 2021 — one billion monthly active users.

Despite its popularity, some marketers may have dismissed TikTok entirely, reducing it to a platform for lighthearted dances and lip-synching. However, it's become a viable option for brands willing to get creative with their digital marketing. So much so, it launched TikTok for Business in 2021, allowing marketers to create and manage ad campaigns on the platform.

Need more convincing? According to the HubSpot Blog's survey of 1,000+ marketers, a whopping 85% cited short-form videos (like those on TikTok) as the most effective social media format in 2021. In fact, more than half of marketers (52%) plan to increase their investment in TikTok this year.

It's not too late to leverage TikTok in 2022. Check out this helpful guide on how to get started.

2. Facebook will become obsolete.

We've all heard the jokes about Facebook's aging audience — and there is some truth to it. A recent study found that Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok were the platforms of choice for Gen Zer's, with Facebook falling into 6th place.

But we can't write off Facebook just yet. It still pulls over 1.5 billion daily active users, making it the most popular social media platform worldwide. It largely holds sway with millennials, the biggest demographic group on the platform.

When it comes to social media marketing, Facebook packs quite a punch. According to HubSpot Blog's survey of 1,000+ marketers, Facebook led the pack as the platform with the highest ROI and engagement in 2021. It's no surprise that 25% of social media marketers plan to invest more in it than any other platform in 2022.

From these stats alone, it's clear Facebook is still a booming business for digital advertising. With its expansion into live video, along with Facebook Shops and Stories, marketers can also experiment with new ad formats in one central location.

3. TikTok will become the preferred platform for influencer marketing.

Despite its popularity, TikTok fell short when it came to influencer marketing in 2021.

Instead, the title belongs to Instagram, which was ranked the platform of choice for inking deals with influencers. So much so, a staggering 97% of marketers plan to increase their investment in influencer marketing on Instagram this year.

Our survey also revealed influencer marketing as the most popular trend with the biggest ROI in 2021. The most notable reason for this uptick is an increase in micro influencers. Micro influencers provide smaller, highly-engaged audiences without the hefty price tag of a mainstream celebrity — making this type of marketing more accessible to a variety of brands.

Want to try your hand at influencer marketing but don't know where to start? Check out this handy checklist.

4. Audio chat rooms will yield huge ROI

2021 saw a wave of live audio apps — including Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. We were all intrigued — was it a viable marketing channel? Could this content go viral?

It turns out, audio chat rooms were great for engagement but not so much for ROI. According to our survey, Clubhouse fell to the bottom of the list regarding ROI. Further, 15% of marketers plan to decrease their investment in audio chat rooms this year.

However, there's a redemption arc — despite having low ROI, many marketers report high engagement rates. If your social media marketing goals are to boost engagement and brand awareness, these audio apps could be the secret ingredient. In fact, 44% of marketers plan to leverage podcasts and audio-based content for the first time this year.

5. Remote events will lose steam as we return to the workplace.

Most people — myself included — thought the workforce would finally return to the office in 2021. But this prediction was a little premature.

Instead, many workplaces have adopted a hybrid work model where employees can work in-office or remote. This could become a permanent arrangement — 51% of organizations are considering a move to hybrid work in a post-COVID world.

As a result, remote and hybrid events are here to stay, and marketers must adapt. 64% of marketers plan to increase their investment in live video and streaming — like Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and YouTube Live — in 2022.

How to Make Better Social Media Marketing Predictions

In the marketing sphere, trends move in light years. As marketers, it's essential to make predictions to equip ourselves for the future. Here, let's cover three ways to make better social media marketing predictions:

• Keep up-to-date: A great forecaster keeps a pulse on new trends and technology. When making social media predictions, staying informed in small — but frequent — bouts is better than in an end-of-year rush.
• Cast a wide net: Seek out a variety of sources for your news. In doing so, you're more likely to get a holistic view of the current climate. Further, you may discover contradictory information — which may call for a second glance.
• Know your biases: We all have biases — and recognizing them is half the battle. Confirmation bias, in particular, can heavily influence how we make predictions. This is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of an already existing belief. To prevent this, you'll need to seek differing viewpoints that challenge your assumptions. It's also important not to jump to conclusions, which creates a false picture of the marketing landscape.

The only constant in the marketing world is change. As a social media marketer, the best thing you can do is stay current on trends and tech, seek out new opinions and viewpoints, and identify trends in your own marketing.

5 Social Media Predictions Marketers Got Wrong Last Year was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

How to Use Custom Affinity Audiences: From Creation to Stellar ROI

Reaching the right customers with your Google Ads campaigns is critical to increase conversions. While it’s possible that scattershot advertisements could catch the interest of Internet users, it’s far more likely that this general ad approach will result in a disconnect between dollars spent and sales made.

To help ensure your ads are reaching the people in the right place, it’s worth leveraging a function in the Google Display Network (GDN) known as affinity audiences. Using these audiences helps pinpoint customer segments that may be more likely to purchase your products, in turn driving more effective and efficient ad spend.

But what exactly is an affinity audience? How do they work, how can you create your own — and what can you expect once you dial in the ideal customer segment? Let's find out.

What are Affinity Audiences?

Affinity audiences are used by the Google Display Network to deliver your ads to relevant locations online. Given that Google’s network reaches more than 90 percent of Internet users worldwide, it’s well worth the time and effort to understand and apply these audiences at scale.

But what is an affinity audience?

Let’s break the term down into its component parts. Audience is easy — it’s the group of people that will see your ad. Affinity, meanwhile, is defined as “a feeling of closeness and understanding that someone has for another person because of their similar qualities, ideas, or interests.” The result? An affinity audience is a group of potential customers that share similar interests or qualities (similar to a buyer persona).

Using affinity audiences allows your brand to better align ad campaigns to buyers who are interested in what you have to sell. For example, if you’re in the coffee-making business but also have a focus on reducing plastic waste, your affinity audience might contain both people who love coffee and those who love the environment. Groups with both of these qualities are far more likely to buy your product than either group individually.

Affinity Targeting

Affinity targeting, meanwhile, is the process of identifying the ideal affinities that align with your product or service. Consider the coffee example above. While targeting buyers who love coffee helps improve your brand placement, it also puts you in direct competition with a host of other brands all producing similar products. Additional affinity modifiers that narrow your focus — such as sustainable growth processes, fair labor practices, or environmental priorities — can help set your brand apart.

Do note that it is possible to get too specific with your audience targeting. For example, if your coffee brand targets audiences that prefer beans from a specific region that are collected, packed, and shipped in a specific way, you may end up with a handful of very loyal customers but almost no broader appeal. As a result, targeting needs to narrow the focus without preventing you from reaching the greater public.

What are Custom Audiences?

GDN and the Google Ads platform contain a host of pre-built Google affinity audiences — also called segments — that you can use to focus your marketing and advertisements. These include everything from pet lovers to do-it-yourselfers, TV comedy fans and users with an interest in news and politics.

But they can’t cover everything. You may have a product or service that doesn't dovetail with existing segments — here, custom affinity audiences can help.

Understanding Custom Affinity Audiences

Custom affinity audiences are those you create yourself in your Google Ads platform to align with the interests of your target customer base. While Google will suggest different potential segment tags depending on what you input, it’s worth taking the time to do some market research before diving into the custom affinity process. This lets you pinpoint the audience preferences that align best with your brand.

You can create custom affinity audiences related to four criteria: Interests, URLs, places, or applications. In general, places and applications are the least useful of the bunch. Here’s why. In our coffee example above, there aren’t a lot of coffee-related applications that would set your audience apart. And while geography has some impact on buying behavior, it’s usually not enough to justify an entire segment.

Interests and URLs, meanwhile, can help you dig down and identify potential affinity options that may be shared by your target market at large.

How to Create Affinity Audiences

Ready to create your own affinity audience? Follow these steps:

1. Log into your Google Ads account.
2. Select “Tools and Settings”, then “Audience manager.”
3. Select “Custom Segments.”
4. Enter segment name and interests.
5. Save your new segment.

Let’s tackle each step in more detail.

1. Log Into Your Google Ads Account

First, log into your Google Ads account. Here, you can see any active campaigns along with the associated affinity audiences.

2. Select “Tools and Settings”, then “Audience Manager”

Next, head to “tools and settings” in the upper-right-hand corner and then find “Audience manager” in the drop-down menu.

3. Select “Custom Segments”

Now you’ll see a list of any data segments you’re currently using to target prospective buyers. To create an audience or segment, click on “Custom Segments” and then the blue “+” icon.

4. Enter Segment Name and Interests

Now, give your segment a name and add a few potential interests. For example, if you enter “coffee”, Google will return interests or purchase intention ideas such as “coffees to make with an espresso machine”, “how to make coffee with coffee beans” and “coffee makers that make different coffees.”

5. Save Your New Segment

Finally, save your new segment with use for ad campaigns. You can create as many segments as you like until you’ve covered all relevant market bases.

The Impact of Effective Affinity Audiences

Ideally, affinity audiences lead to a definitive result: Increased ROI.

Here’s why: When your ads are shown to audiences that are interested in what you’re selling, they’re more likely to click through and purchase your products. As a result, the money you spend on advertising is directly offset by the conversions driven by these ads, in turn creating positive ROI. More generic campaigns, meanwhile, may still increase overall sales but not enough to balance out the spend required to reach larger audiences.

The right audience makes all the difference. Targeted, customized affinity audiences help you reach the people that want to buy your products, in turn boosting conversions and making your overall ad spend more cost-effective. Custom affinity audiences further narrow your market targeting, increasing the likelihood of revenue and reducing the gap between what you spend on ads and what you get in return.

How to Use Custom Affinity Audiences: From Creation to Stellar ROI was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

Hosting / Website / Content Management System Services - Alignment Onlin...

Cell Phone Holder for Car | Best Cell Phone Car Mount | Dashboard Phone ...

Java Burn Review - Pros & Cons Of Java Burn - 2021 Java Burn Review

Beyond the Height-of-Land | 25 Days in the Northern Manitoba Wild - E10 ...

The 8 Best Marketing Frameworks You Need to Know

Marketing is a unique animal. With a combination of creativity, analytical thinking, taking data into consideration, and project management, a modern-day marketer must possess a great number of skills and have quite a few tools at their disposal.

Sure, you can delegate some of the work, but it also means you’re responsible for getting multiple people on the same page…some of which work in different states.

Rather than allowing your frustration to build, you can utilize tools that will make your job easier. More specifically, marketing frameworks. In this piece, we’ll discuss what a marketing strategy framework is, the benefits of utilizing one, the best marketing models out there, and how to decide which is best for you.

You can think of it like this: you wouldn’t dream of approaching your marketing with a “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” attitude because it would be a disaster for your organization.

Instead, you'll likely spend days, weeks, and maybe even months identifying your target audience, where they spend time and determining the perfect way to reach them and communicate the benefits of your product or service in a marketing plan.

Your marketing strategy framework takes this all a step further and, as mentioned above, ensures your marketing plan is successful because you’ll share content with your audiences at the right time in the most relevant channels that are more likely to drive results.

The Benefits of a Marketing Framework

A Marketing Framework does more than just keep you focused on the task at hand. As your company grows and your team grows along with it, you must find a way to communicate with every member of the marketing department, no matter where they work or what tasks they are responsible for.

Creating a marketing framework is the best way to ensure that everyone knows what they need to do and how they need to do it. Additional benefits of utilizing a marketing framework include:

• Creating a home for templates, guides, tools, and assets that all marketers in your organization will need to access.
• Establishing and communicating approved verbiage for the organization.
• Improving marketing which then improves the growth and bottom line of the company.
• Allows the team to compare different strategies and determine the best route.
• Clearly communicate who is responsible for what and make it easier to transfer people from one role to another.
• Save time by limiting “redos” - areas that are often susceptible to errors and therefore must be reworked.

In addition, your framework will help you predict your customer’s behavior and the revenue you can expect to see. As a result, it will help your team function more efficiently and produce more effectively.

The Best Marketing Frameworks

Marketing has probably been around since prehistoric days when entrepreneurial cavemen designed state-of-the-art spears and tried to sell them to their less “handy” counterparts.

Okay, that might not be true, but marketing has been a necessary aspect of business for a long time, and, over that time, savvy marketers have designed models and frameworks to make their (and your) job easier. Let’s take a look at some traditional models as well as some newer frameworks.

Traditional Marketing Models

1. 7Ps Marketing Mix

This widely used model considers the stages of business strategy, beginning at conception and taking it to evaluation. The Ps stand for:

• Product: What’s being sold?
• Prince: How much does it cost?
• Place: Where will the product be sold?
• Promotion: How will you communicate with your audience?
• People: Who is involved in the production, promotion, and distribution?
• Process: How will you deliver it to the customer?
• Physical Evidence: How will you prove to customers that your business exists?

When you utilize the 7P model, you’ll have the opportunity to analyze and optimize every aspect of your company and your strategy to improve your business.

Image Source

2. STP Marketing Model

The SPT model is a top-down approach that focuses on how a company addresses customers and helps deliver personalized (and relevant) messages to audiences.

STP stands for segmentation (dividing your audience into different sections), targeting (who will be the most receptive to your product), and positioning (how do you make your product the most appealing to that audience), and has helped many companies shift to utilizing social media to deliver content.

Image Source

3. Porter’s Five Forces

While most marketing frameworks focus on the product itself and the audience, Porter’s Five Forces looks at the outside influences that can affect profitability. These include:

• Supplier Power, how many other suppliers exist, what makes them different, and how much their product costs.
• Buyer Power, which is the customer’s ability to influence decisions made by the company.
• Threat of Substitution, which is how your product compares to others on the market.
• Threat of New Entry, which is any barriers you might experience when entering the market.
• Competitive Rivalry, which is any other outside forces that affect how your product compares to the competition.

This model will help determine just how competitive your business environment is.

Image Source

Now, let’s look at some of the newer models to hit the marketing scene. While they may not have been around as long as the more traditional models, they take into account the current marketing climate and often focus on start-ups.

Modern Marketing Models

4. Pirate Metrics or “AARRR!”

No, you don’t have to don an eye patch or adopt a parrot to use this framework. Developed by serial Startup Founder Dave McClure, Pirate Metrics allows you to see how a customer may travel on their buying journey and what areas you need to improve. AARRR stands for:

• Acquisition: Where are prospects finding you? Facebook ads, blog content, a paid search, etc.
• Activation: What step did a prospect take once they arrived at your website? Depending on the business, this could include signing up for an account, downloading a free giveaway in exchange for their email, filling out a profile, etc.
• Retention: Once they’ve left your site, do prospects or customers come back? How often?
• Revenue: How do you earn money from your customers? Consider reviewing metrics such as conversion rates, shopping cart size, and the LTV or customer lifetime value.
• Referral: When customers are happy, they tell other people, and you end up with more customers. This lowers your CAC or customer acquisition cost because your loyal customers will attract new prospects for you.

Image Source

5. Lean Analytics Stages

Developed by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz, the Lean Analytics Stage framework combines aspects of many different models and is ideal for improving startup growth. There are five pillars to this model:

1. Empathy

During the product development stage, you’ll spend most of your time listening to customers, empathizing with their challenges, and taking in as much feedback as they are willing to provide. Once you have identified a problem you can solve to create your minimum viable product (MVP), you can then move on to the next stage.

2. Stickiness

Focus on engagement and retention as you work to create something that yields return customers. When you’ve got an engaged base and a low attrition rate, you can continue to stage three.

3. Virality

Before you try to attract customers through heavy advertising spending, focus on your existing customers. As your organic growth rates improve, you can move to stage four.

4. Revenue

Without money, you’ll be out of business quickly. Pay attention to your customer acquisition cost metrics to make sure your customers spend more money than they cost to acquire. Once you’ve reached your revenue goals, you can move to the final stage.

5. Scale

You’ve got explicit knowledge of your product and your market. Now, it’s time to increase the revenue from your current market and potentially enter into new markets.

Image Source

6. The Hook Model

No, it has nothing to do with the Pirate Metrics we discussed earlier, but it does compliment the stickiness and virality we discussed during Lean Analytics.

The Hook Model was developed by Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. He believes that our most purchased and utilized products achieve that status because they become a part of habitual behaviors. As marketers, we can tap into that by understanding the cycle:

• Trigger: The beginning of the cycle is often an external trigger like a push notification. However, as the cycle continues, negative internal emotions become triggers as we attempt to lessen these negative emotions with an action.
• Action: The easier you make things to do, the more likely a person will do it. Habit-forming products make taking action painless and straightforward.
• Variable Reward: The anticipation of reward is a strong motivator. Variability increases anticipation, making prospects and customers more likely to take an action that warrants a reward.
• Investment: Creating an investment or “buy-in” for your customers makes it more difficult for them to step away from your product or service.

Image Source

7. The ICE Score

Sean Ellis, the Father of Growth Marketing, teaches the ICE score, a simple and quick way to evaluate potential channels for growth.

Rather than implementing a complex system, Ellis suggests asking three questions:

1. What will the impact of this move be if it works?
2. How confident am I that this plan will work?
3. How much time, money, and effort will be necessary to put this into action?

Asking yourself and your team these questions is one of the fastest ways to evaluate an idea and determine if you should move forward.

8. STEPPS

Developed by Jonah Burger, the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, STEPPS is a formula to create contagious content that has people talking and sharing.

• Social Currency: Invite your customers to feel more like insiders. Humans are programmed to care what others think of them. This taps into that need to be seen positively by others and encourages conversation around your product.
• Triggers: Frequently remind people of your product utilizing triggers and they’ll talk about it more.
• Emotion: Highly emotional content is more likely to go viral. Taking that one step further, high arousal emotions like anger will be shared more often than low arousal emotions like sadness.
• Public: When you make something public, you encourage people to talk about it and share it.
• Practical Value: Provide value in the form of useful content, and people will be more likely to share it.
• Stories: We are biologically wired to see the world through narrative. Creative stories that are easy to relate to and easy to remember, and they’ll also be easy to share.

Image Source

Selecting the Best Marketing Framework for Your Business

While there are a variety of models available to you, they are not all created equal. There are a number of factors that will influence which framework is best for you and your organization.

In order to determine which framework to choose, you’ll want to examine the following aspects of your business:

• What are the top priorities of the business?
• What is the role of marketing within the organization?
• How is success defined and measured within the marketing?
• What is the marketing department capable of, and what improvements would you like to make?
• Where would you like to see the most impact due to marketing efforts and what’s the easiest way to ensure that impact?

Over To You

Marketing is a difficult role no matter your product or service. You are in essence responsible for telling the world that your company has the cure to what ails them. Without you, the most amazing product or service ever created will never reach the hands of the people who need it.

As challenging as it is, there are tools you can utilize to take some of the difficulty out of your responsibilities. A marketing framework will help you stay the course, keep your team in the know and on the right path, and will ultimately help you better achieve your desired goals. Create a marketing framework today and make tomorrow easier.

The 8 Best Marketing Frameworks You Need to Know was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns

20 of the Best Free Google Sheets Templates for 2022

Google Sheets templates help you create better spreadsheets while saving you valuable time.

A template knows what you need and offers it without any manual input, giving you the ability to focus on more important things — such as making sense of the data itself.

In this post, we’ll cover every template you’ll ever need to easily and efficiently use Google Sheets for business, including templates for project management, reporting, people management, and customer tracking.

You'll learn:

1. Why you should use Google Sheets templates for business;

2. Step-by-step instruction on how to find the built-in Google Sheets templates;

3. A roundup of additional Google Sheets templates for any marketing role, including:

• Templates for Finances
• Templates for Reporting and Analytics
• Templates for Customers
• Templates for Project Management
• Templates to Help Lead a Team

Let’s get started.

Why use Google Sheets templates for business?

Google Sheets templates are a fantastic business tool that can be used by teams of any size. Whether you’re a business just starting out or an established enterprise firm, you’ll enjoy countless benefits when using Google Sheets templates.

Even if you don’t use them as your primary business tool, they can supplement other tools. For instance, you might use a free CRM to track customer information, then use a Google Sheets invoice template to quickly create invoices for each customer.

Let’s go over the top benefits of using Google Sheets templates for business.

Free

Google Sheets templates are completely free to use, and they cover a wide variety of needs. So you won’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting an Excel subscription (or a subscription for another tool). Simply have everyone sign up for a Google Workspace account and get immediate working access to the templates.

Ability to Collaborate

Google Sheets templates allow your team to collaborate with little gatekeeping. The only thing you have to do is click the “Share” button at the top right-hand corner of a document, and your team members will have access to the file.

You can also limit the collaboration aspect to commenting or viewing only. This is a great option for sensitive documents that only a few people should edit.

Intuitive to Use

To use a Google Sheets template, you need very little experience with spreadsheets. You don’t need to know advanced formulas and functions to make them work for you. The templates already come with all of the fields and calculations built-in. All you have to do is plug in the numbers and populate the fields, and the document will generate a report or calculate a total.

Customizable

That you’re using a template doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with its look and feel. You can easily change the fields, the colors, and the fonts using Google Sheets’ built-in tools. Once you do, you’ll feel like the template is your business’ only.

No Data Loss

Another great benefit of using Google Sheets templates? Unless a freak accident happens with Google’s servers, it’s near impossible to lose data. All changes are stored in the cloud, and Google Sheets includes a version history of the document, where you can revert to a previous version if something happens.

If your laptop crashes or you lose internet connection, Google Sheets simply freezes the copy until you’re online again. You’ll still want to take a few precautions, such as enabling offline editing and downloading a copy of the document to your local drive.

Ready to find a few templates that you can start using right now for your business?

How to Find Templates In Google Sheets

There are two common ways you can find and use free Google Sheets templates.

1. Google’s In-Built Template Gallery

On your browser, go to Google Sheets. Click “Template Gallery” at the top right. Explore the templates to find the right one for you.

You’ll find different templates for your personal, work, and project management needs. Here's an example of what the Personal template library looks like:

2. Add-Ons

Another way to find free templates in Google Sheets is to download and install the Vertex42 add-on. Here’s how:

Open an existing Google sheet, or type “ sheets.new” to create a new one. Then, find and click the “Add-ons” button on the top left menu.

Type “Vertex42” into the search bar, and click enter. Install the add-on.

To access the templates, click on “Add-ons,” then “Template Gallery for Sheets,” then “Browse Templates.”

Here you would find templates that can help with almost everything you need — whether you need to create an invoice, income/expense tracker, or a dashboard to manage your projects.

Let’s now look at some of the free Google Sheets templates you would find useful as you run your business.

Google Sheets Templates

Whether your position requires you to send invoices to clients, track website analytics, or create budget and expense reports, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself working with spreadsheets in some form. And if you’re anything like me, those spreadsheets can feel frustratingly tedious when you’re under a time crunch.

Fortunately, Google Sheets offers a wide variety of pre-built templates, allowing you to create reports and analyze data in spreadsheets faster and more effectively.

The following Google Sheets templates cater to specific categories and allow you to cut hours, if not days, of work in one fell swoop. Let’s go over the best google Sheets templates you can start using now.

Google Sheets Templates for Finances

Spreadsheets are popular tool for bookkeeping and invoicing. Below, you’ll find a curated selection of ready-to-go templates that will allow you to invoice clients, maintain an annual business budget, generate financial statements, create expense reports, and generate purchase reports.

The result is a ton of saved time — there’s no need to create or choose any formulas that will help you calculate this data.

1. Invoices

If you’re a freelancer or work for a small business, you probably use invoices to bill clients for services. This invoice template makes the process simple — it provides space for all the necessary information and looks more professional than a plain spreadsheet. Plus, the template is customizable, so you can create a theme that aligns well with your brand image.

Click here to use this template.

2. Annual Business Budget

This template is more in-depth than it initially appears. There are tabs at the bottom — setup, income, expenses, summary — and each one includes several subcategories. “Expenses,” for instance, covers everything from taxes and insurance to travel and customer acquisition.

The final tab, "summary,” takes your income, subtracts your expenses, and automatically updates to display your ending balance each month. This template is a good option if your budget requires a lot of customization and many moving parts.

Click here to use this template.

3. Financial Statements

The financial statements template truly is an all-in-one resource to keep track of business transactions, profits, and losses. The “profit & loss” tab automatically summarizes revenue, costs, and expenses for the year and can display your growth rate percentage.

If you work for a small business and need to manage much of your finances, this template offers resources and guidance to make the process easier and less prone to human error.

Click here to use this template.

4. Expense Report

Knowing how much you spend is an essential part of running a successful business. But it’s often easy to forget to record these expenses with the amount of work you have to do every day. This simple expense report template makes it easy to record all of your expenses and those of your employees.

Click here to use this template.

5. Purchase Order

You’ll find this template to be a life-saver if tracking the orders or supplies your office/department makes is part of your job. With this sheet, you can save time and avoid the headaches that come with monitoring orders or shipments.

Click here to use this template.

Google Sheet Templates for Reporting and Analytics

Reporting dashboards are typically built into a wide variety of software products, such as Marketing Hub, but if you don’t have the budget, you can easily create one using a Google Sheets template.

The below templates automatically gather data from Google Analytics, putting the data in a highly digestible visual format that you can share with higher-ups and other people in your team.

6. Website Traffic Dashboard

Suppose your role requires you to analyze website traffic using Google Analytics. In that case, this template is a fantastic supplemental tool to pull that data into an organized report, saving you tons of time. Better still, you can use the dashboard template with Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to monitor and analyze data from PPC, SEO, social media, and website analytics.

Click here to use this template.

7. Website Paid Traffic Report

This template makes the process of analyzing and reporting on paid traffic relatively seamless. The spreadsheet is split into Overview, 12-month Trends, and Medium Breakdown categories. It automatically collects data on your paid sources from Google Analytics and provides a clean chart with important information, including PPC’s percentage of goal conversions, total traffic, and bounce rate.

You can also adjust it to compare different periods or different channels or segments. If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate paid’s influence on your business, this is the tool to do it.

Click here to use this template.

Google Sheet Templates for Customers

If you don’t have access to a CRM yet or your business is still growing, you can use spreadsheets to track customer information and see the growth of your business. The below Google Sheets templates allow you to have a CRM and a sales dashboard without paying the cost typically needed for such software.

Remember, however, that as your business starts to grow and you earn more and more customers, you’ll want to switch over to a dedicated CRM.

8. CRM

To organize your contacts and automate an effective sales and marketing process, you must have a CRM — but if you’re a small company just starting, you might not feel ready to implement a fully established CRM with all the features.

This CRM template is a great place to get your feet wet. It saves automatically, so you never lose data. The share feature allows you to work with coworkers within the CRM, which helps encourage collaboration between your sales and marketing departments.

Click here to use this template.

9. Sales Dashboard

This template helps salespeople manage their leads, sales, and revenue all in one place. At the bottom of the template are different tabs where you can easily input your data that eventually shows up on the main dashboard. There’s also an “instructions” tab to get you up to speed with using the sheet.

Click here to use this template.

Google Sheet Templates for Project Management

Using a Google Sheets project management template is a much more cost-effective alternative to buying a team-wide subscription for a project management software.

The below templates are the absolute best for keeping track of a project’s timeline, creating Gantt charts, creating product roadmaps, and generating action lists. They allow you to color-code and categorize action items and individual tasks.

Hot tip: If you’re managing multiple projects, simply duplicate the initial tab and keep all projects in a single spreadsheet.

10. Project Timeline

Whether this is your first significant project or you’ve been managing projects for years, the project timeline template is a valuable tool for organizing and implementing each project step. The template helps you visually break up a daunting project into smaller pieces, ideally making it easier and less stressful to manage and delegate tasks.

Click here to use this template.

11. Project Tracking

If you’re juggling many projects simultaneously, this project tracking template could become your new best friend. This template takes project management to the next level by enabling you to organize your tasks into categories by date, deliverables, status, cost, and hours — best of all, it lets you prioritize your projects. Hopefully, simply visualizing what needs to get done first will alleviate time-management stress.

Click here to use this template.

12. Event Marketing Timeline

The event marketing template offers organization and structure if you’re implementing an upcoming business event or campaign. It provides categories you might’ve forgotten to consider, including local and national marketing, PR, and web, with subcategories ranging from an email newsletter to impact studies.

The template is already organized with all necessary categories for planning an event, reducing the time you spend on tedious manual input.

Click here to use this template.

13. Gantt Chart Template

The Gantt chart template helps you alleviate any concern you might have over timing — and, when you’ve got a complex project with overlapping components, I’m willing to bet timing is one of your primary concerns.

Using the Gantt chart template helps you visualize all steps and delegate essential tasks more efficiently — labeling the task with an owner on one chart is undoubtedly easier than individually following up via email. And by sharing the template with coworkers, everyone is on the same page.

Click here to use this template.

14. Product Roadmap

Without a product roadmap, it’s easy for your team to misunderstand the direction you want a project to take. With this template, you can solve that problem. The template provides a calendar summary of a project and the milestones and deliverables as you go through the product development process.

Click here to use this template.

15. Product Launch Plan

This template has everything you need to organize the best product launch you’ve ever had. It has fields to help you outline your market and competitive analysis, project strategy, key messaging, and who your target audience is.

If you’re in charge of managing a product launch and want to organize the best launch ever, then this is the project management template for you.

Click here to use this template.

16. Action List With Ranking

Managing a project requires that you track daily actions to ensure you don’t lose focus. But sometimes, you’ll have some tasks on your list that are more important than others. You can easily arrange these tasks based on their importance with this action list template. You can also share this sheet with others if you’re working as a team.

Click here to use this template.

17. Project Budget

Away from the general business budget, most managers create budgets for each of their projects. This project budget template is for you if you’re looking for a simple yet effective template that lets you quickly estimate how much revenue a project would generate and how much it would cost.

Click here to use this template.

Google Sheet Templates for Leading a Team

Managing a team is easy and simple with the following Google Sheets templates. No need to send emails back and forth, and no need to check in individually with each team member over Slack or another team communication app.

With the following templates, you can set employee shifts and track how many hours employees have spent on a certain project. And remember, these templates are collaborative — meaning that you only need to give access to your employees for them to fill it out on their own time. The changes will immediately be live in the shared copy.

18. Employee Shift Schedule

Keeping track of who works what hours, and how much each employee gets paid, can feel confusing, especially if you lead a team of part-time contractors or seasonal interns. This template includes slots for employee’s names, hours worked, and monthly wages, making your paycheck process straightforward and organized.

Click here to use this template.

19. Weekly Timesheet

Like the employee shift schedule, the weekly timesheet helps you track time and know how much to pay employees or subcontractors. However, the weekly timesheet template works better if you want to quickly find out how much time each employee spends on a project.

Click here to use this template.

20. Contact List

This template comes in handy if you want to create a contact list database. You can easily use the template to store your contact information (say, phone number and email address), your employees’ contact, and those of emergency services like the ambulance or fire department.

Click here to use this template.

Start Using These Free Google Sheets Templates

No matter what your job is, using a suitable spreadsheet would make it easier and more enjoyable.

So what are you waiting for? Get started with using these free Google Sheets templates to save time and effort, and download ten additional ones to exponentially improve your productivity.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

20 of the Best Free Google Sheets Templates for 2022 was originally posted by Local Sign Company Irvine, Ca. https://goo.gl/4NmUQV https://goo.gl/bQ1zHR http://www.pearltrees.com/anaheimsigns